While I’ve been self-isolating (one very mild case of coronavirus in the house, over now) I’ve had the chance to finish Robert Griffith’s Riflemen, a history of the 5th Battalion, 60th (Royal American) Regiment.
The first thing to say about this book, and the most
important, is that it is very, very good. Technically it’s not
the first history of the battalion, because a couple were produced early in the
19th century, but it’s the first modern history.
I’m not an academic historian, so I’m probably not the right
person to say how these things should be done, but this seems a remarkable
piece of historical research. Rob has spent a spectacular amount of time with
army pay lists and battalion details in the National Archives. This book is the
product of a considerable amount of original study. (I know that reviews don’t
normally refer to the author by given name, but Rob is a well-known figure on
the army historical research scene and calling him anything else just seems
odd.)
Rob Griffith presenting at the National Army Museum
The 5/60th was formed in December 1797. Originally made up mainly of German (or vaguely Germanic) soldiers, it introduced many of the practices that distinguished rifle regiments, from tactics to the green uniform at a time when most British troops still wore scarlet. The 5/60th served the British Army until 1818 when it was lost with a reduction of the number of battalions in the 60th. Its impact on light infantry tactics, though, remained for many years.
The 5/60th was formed at a time when the 60th operated mostly in the West Indies – regarded as part of the Americas, hence the American (later Royal American) regiment. It was because the regiment served mainly in America that it was seen as a safe place to man almost exclusively with foreign soldiers, often with their own foreign officers. Despite this, the 5/60 first saw action in Ireland during the 1798 rebellion. Later it saw active service in Surinam and garrison duty in Nova Scotia as well as the West Indies. It was the Peninsular War, though, that made the reputation of the 5/60th (though the 95th Rifles is the regiment best remembered nowadays, partly because of the efforts of the fictitious Sharpe). The battalion was awarded 16 battle honours for its campaigns in the peninsula and across the Pyrenees into France. It was still fighting at Toulouse when Napoleon abdicated in 1814.
I have to admit I did not find this
an easy read. It has over 400 pages and there are
three distinct but interwoven threads throughout. Firstly, it is the story of
the men who served. Rob provides an astonishing amount of detail about
individual men, from their lives before joining the regiment, through their
service with brilliant insights culled from court-martial records, to the time
and nature of their deaths. Detailed accounts are sometimes given of the
medical treatment they suffered (and I use the word advisedly) before their
deaths and these can make uncomfortable reading. I had the pleasure of
listening to Rob lecture on the men of the battalion at the National Army
Museum. In many ways it was better than reading the book, because anecdotes
about real people bring home the reality of the times so well.
The second strand is information that puts the battalion into the wider military context. We get details of the need to build up the army and how this was done, how men were recruited and trained, with a lot of detail on the tactics that were taught. There’s a discussion of the rifle and the way it was loaded and fired. (Lying down with your feet to the enemy and firing from that position is counter-intuitive but apparently could work.) We learn about garrison life in various colonial outposts and how officers lobbied for, or bought, promotion. There is a lot about life on campaign with details of provisioning, medical treatment and arrangements (or the lack of arrangements) for sheltering the troops. If you are interested in the nitty-gritty of life in Wellington’s army – mainly, but not exclusively, the light infantry – this is a must.
The second strand, in particular, comes and goes with whole chapters on various aspects of military life interspersed with a chronological account of the campaigns of the 5/60th, which are inevitably dominated by the Peninsular campaign. It helps, I think, if you already have some idea of Wellington’s war. I imagine most readers will, and when Rob is talking about a battle I know or I place I’ve visited, I found the accounts enlightening. Without that background, though, the incessant marching, counter marching, flanking, advancing and retreating can just become something of a blur. It’s massively better than my ‘O’ level history (where the Peninsular War, for some unfathomable reason, featured heavily) but still not nearly as clear as some fictional accounts. (Lynn Bryant’s Peninsular War saga, for example, gives staggeringly accurate and understandable accounts of many of the battles.) Riflemen does benefit from some nice maps, though occasionally significant details are missed off. Rob also adopts the standard use of differently shaded blocks to separate cavalry and infantry with colour distinguishing the British and French forces. Sadly, the maps are all in black and white, leaving room for considerable confusion and far too many jokes about shades of grey.
I have always been interested in how Wellington moved from the often defensive warfare, largely in the south and west of Spain, to taking the war to the enemy and crossing the Pyrenees and this book gives a good overview of this. I do understand now why so many writers seem to overlook what should be a dramatic end to the story of the campaign. In fact, the move into France seems to have been very scrappy with few clear victories and defeats and even more marching to and fro than in Spain, but now with the added bonus of extreme cold. I honestly struggled with this bit, but I don’t think it’s Rob’s fault. Almost 400 pages in, accounts of the tides on the Adour robbed me of the will to live. I think the soldiers (with rather more excuse) were beginning to flag too. A disproportionate number of the 5/60th died in these last weeks of the war while the French, fighting on their home ground with decent numbers of men, were unable to turn the tide. I think both sides knew the war was over and were by now going through the bloody motions without conviction. The weariness the reader may well feel at this point is probably a fair reflection of the subject matter.
Obviously I found some parts of this
book better than others and, for me, it could well have been a bit shorter. But
other people will be gripped by exactly the bits I skimmed over while they may
find the accounts of courts-martial (all gripping stuff in my view) irrelevant
and dull. The fact is that this isn’t really a book to read carefully
cover-to-cover (unless you are a very serious military history nerd, in which
case your dreams have all just come true). It’s the definitive history of one
battalion which had a disproportionate role not only in the war against
Napoleon but also in developing the infantry techniques of the British Army.
It’s an astonishing work of scholarship and an invaluable reference for anyone
with a serious interest in this period. If you have a passion for almost any
aspect of the British Army of the time, there will be something in this book
for you.
Robert Griffith is to be congratulated on this excellent work.
A word from our sponsor
My interest in the Napoleonic era stems from the research that I’ve done for my books about James Burke. Burke was real person and although most of his adventures are fictional a lot of research goes into making the backgrounds authentic (though nothing like the level of research that Rob Griffith does). Eventually it gets to the point where I spent more time writing stuff like this than I do writing fiction. (I am working on a non-fiction account of the background to Waterloo, if anyone knows a publisher who might want it.) Nobody pays me for writing these blog posts, although I do now accept donations if anybody wants to buy me a coffee. What I would really appreciate, though, is if you bought one of books. They are all available on Kindle and cost £2.99 or less.
Last week, when the world seemed a very different place and people still went to the theatre, I saw ‘Magic Goes Wrong’ at the Vaudeville on the Strand. I know people who know people who advised the show on its magical content, so I was confident that I would enjoy the evening but I didn’t know what to expect.
What I got was a very traditional evening of magic, but
things did often go a bit wrong. Or very wrong.
If you’ve already read Dark Magic you will have some idea what’s going on. If you haven’t, let me explain …
The show that you get in ‘Magic Goes Wrong’ is supposed to
be a benefit for a charity set up to benefit the victims of magical accidents.
There are some famous real-life magical accidents. The bullet catch trick (and,
yes, that does feature in Dark Magic)
is supposed to have claimed several fatalities, most famously the Chinese
Magician Chung Ling Soo (in fact an American called William Ellsworth Robinson). Chung Ling Soo was shot dead on stage at the
Wood Green Empire in London in 1918.
Roy Horn (of Siegfried & Roy) was almost killed by a tiger in his Las Vegas act in 2003, ending his career. Houdini collapsed on stage after a student visiting his dressing room had hit him several times in the abdomen, something that Houdini could cope with when he was prepared in his act but was unable to survive when taken by surprise. (The student had had no ill-intent but hadn’t realised that Houdini needed to brace himself for the blow.)
Most magic shows,
though, pass without incident. Even in the cursed world of Dark Magic there is never a performance with multiple fatalities.
‘Magic Goes Wrong’, on the other hand, starts with the unfortunate demise of a
pigeon and builds up to a truly impressive body count. I didn’t believe the
trigger warning that starts the evening and which warns of a live bear. I
should have. And the people the bear (inevitably) savages should have taken it
more seriously too.
‘Magic Goes Wrong’
hasn’t a serious or meaningful bone in its twisted body. (Speaking of which,
the contortionist act is a minor highlight.) It is, however, consistently
hilarious. It also features some impressive real magic – much of which goes
unremarked by an audience far too caught up in the comedy to realise that they
really are watching things that should be impossible. Penn & Teller have
contributed an escape from a sealed water tank which I have seen them perform
as a major trick in their stage show. Here the magician apparently drowning on
stage is easily ignored while your attention is fixed on the antics of cast,
crew and unfortunate audience volunteer as they combine to doom the poor man to
a watery death. People vanish and reappear, girls are cut in half, and men in
small boxes are pierced through with spears. All you are concentrating on,
though, is the magician’s assistant opening the door of a vanishing cabinet
before the magician has left it, the stage set that closes just a few seconds
earlier than it needs to, or the sound effect that comes on at all the most
inappropriate moments.
I was going to recommend that you all buy tickets but, of course, you can’t go to see it now. With any luck it will be back on once the present crisis has passed. It’s something to look forward to.
Meanwhile, if you want comedy based on a magic show with an unfeasibly high body count, you could read Dark Magic. It’s escapist fun and we all need that right now. It may be hard to get hold of the paperback as Amazon concentrates on delivering more important things, but you can still buy it on Kindle. It’s just £1.99 and will take your mind off things for a day.
With everybody getting super excited about coronavirus, it’s a bit difficult to focus on the mundane business of producing a weekly blog post. I don’t generally write about things as late as the First World War or I would be writing about the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic which some people think killed more people than war itself.
The 1889 – 1890 flu pandemic is closer to my time period and is mentioned in Jean Stubbs’ “Victorian mystery” Dear Laura, which I reviewed here back in 2018. Known as Russian flu, it killed about one million people world-wide. The spread of Russian flu was extremely rapid. It seems to have started in St Petersburg early in December 1889. It reached Britain only six weeks later. (This does show that the absence of air travel doesn’t stop pandemic coronaviruses.)
Wars are often associated with disease outbreaks but I can’t think of an epidemic that is associated with the war against Napoleon. It’s horribly possible that the terrible death toll over the 20 years of fighting the French meant that deaths from disease did not stand out. The year after fighting finished was the “year without a summer” when, following a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia, there was a year of low temperatures and heavy rains which resulted in agricultural failure across Europe. This led to the worst famine seen in 19th-century Europe. Doubtless there will have been many deaths from disease as well, but these were lost in the famine deaths.
The evacuation of Walcheren by the English
Regular readers of this blog will already know about Walcheren fever, which struck down so many British soldiers in 1809. It’s likely that Walcheren fever was not one sickness but a combination of malaria, typhus and typhoid fever. Malaria, of course, is not contagious and because the soldiers were effectively isolated abroad many of those with typhus and typhoid fever died before returning to Britain. Walcheren fever doesn’t seem to have spread into the general population (although, of course, typhus and typhoid fever were common at the time).
Moving further back into history we get to the Great Plague of London in 1665/6, as featured in Deborah Swift’s excellent (and profoundly depressing) A Plague on Mr Pepys. The Great Plague killed an estimated 100,000 people—almost a quarter of London’s population—in 18 months. Terrible as it was, it pales into insignificance compared to the 14th century Black Death, which is thought to have killed around half the population of Europe. It took literally hundreds of years for population levels to climb back to their pre-plague levels. The social and economic changes that resulted from the Black Death marked the beginning of the end of feudalism in Britain.
Back before the days of vaccines, deaths from contagious diseases were an everyday reality and epidemics culled the human population terrifyingly often. (I’ve only mentioned the big ones: minor outbreaks were too common to count.) Even as late as 1941 something as mundane as measles killed 1,145 people in England and Wales. To our forefathers, coronavirus deaths would hardly have been worth noticing. This is not to diminish the awfulness of seeing your friends and family die before their time, but it helps, perhaps, to see this latest outbreak of disease in the perspective of a long history of epidemics and pandemics.
References and credits
Valleron, Meurisse & Boelle (2008) Historical Analysis of the 1889–1890 Pandemic in Europe International Journal of Infectious Diseases
Public Health England: Measles notifications and deaths in England and Wales: 1940 to 2017
Images
Main image: Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov. 1887.
Newspaper cover: Supplement to Le Petit Parisien 1890
The evacuation of Walcheren by the English – By Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux
Two women lying dead in a London street during the great plague, 1665, one with a child who is still alive. Etching after R. Pollard II.. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Creative Commons licence
A word from our sponsor
That’s enough death and disaster for one week.
I post something on this blog a little over once a week on average, but I don’t make a penny out of it. If you enjoy reading the blog, the only thing I ask is that you buy one or more of my books. The cheapest of my books on Kindle costs just 99p. There is information on all my books, with buy links, on this website: http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk/my-books/
Alternatively, can I suggest that you look at the ‘Buy me a coffee‘ button and consider a donation? Ironically, the app doesn’t take donations as low as 99p and you don’t even get a book out of it, but I suspect that some people might find the idea of a straightforward donation easier than buying a book they may never read.
My post on tango from a couple of months back is now my fifth most popular post in the two years I’ve been on this blog. It’s odd because people always say they want stuff about history or writing. What to do?
How about I post about tango and history? Or tango and writing?
Or, because tango is a fairly visual thing, tango in films?
OK, let’s do that.
Tango in history
Tango doesn’t feature in my books at all, despite the first of my books about James Burke (Burke in the Land of Silver) being set largely in Buenos Aires. That’s because the action takes place early in the 19th century and tango didn’t really start until rather later. According to the famous Argentine tango historian, Horatio Ferrer “the spiritual and artistic genesis of tango took place from about 1880 to circa 1895”.
Tango remained virtually unknown outside South America until
the early 20th century. Then it moved to Europe, notably Paris, where it became
very fashionable. It spread across the continent, reaching Helsinki just before
the First World War, where it developed into the distinctive Finnish Tango that
is still popular today. By the 1920s tango was being filmed. Rudolph Valentino
was hugely successful with films like The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The tango singer, Carlos Gardel, starred
in a series of films from The Lights of
Buenos Aires in 1931 until his death in 1935. Many of his films were
released by Paramount in the USA and although they were made in Spanish they drew
big audiences and moved tango further into the mainstream.
Carlos Gardel’s Grave
Vernon and Irene Castle, who were influential ballroom
dancers and teachers at a time when that was pretty much like rock-star status
now, adapted the tango to make it more acceptable to conservative American
dancers. (They even developed a version where the partners did not touch each
other at all.) Eventually their approach developed into ballroom tango, which
has only a tangential relationship to Argentine tango, but which remains
popular with Strictly fans to today.
Tango in books
One of my favourite books ever is the totally wonderful Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones.It’s a book about life and death, loss and rediscovery and it made me cry, but in a good way. Tango is a central motif of the book and, unlike a lot of fiction about the dance, it’s been written by someone who understands it so well you can practically use it as a teach-yourself book. (Please don’t though. There is no substitute for proper lessons.)
Apart from Here at the
End of the World… tango seems strangely absent in European and American
literature. Tony Parsons’ Starting Over
finds his hero finally redeemed by dance in the milongas of Buenos Aires but
most of the fiction that Goodreads files under ‘tango’ has titles like Red Hot Fantasy and Laid Bare. Tango’s reputation for sexual impropriety lives on in
books like these.
The Tango Singer
is a lovely Argentine book that sees Buenos Aires through the story of a
mythical tango singer, though the book (like many Argentinians) concentrates on
the songs rather than the dance.
The best accounts of tango in books are through memoirs.
Amongst tango dancers the favourite (and quite a succes de scandale when it was published in 2012) is probably Twelve Minutes of Love, a
reference to the average length of time a couple will dance together before
changing partners. The Bulgarian author, Kapka Kassabova, has travelled round
the world behaving disgracefully in tango salons wherever she went and her
deliciously indiscreet memoir left red faces from New Zealand to Scotland.
Another classic is Long After Midnight at the Nino Bien
which is part coming-of-age story and part travelogue as a young American moves
to Buenos Aires and falls desperately in love with his tango teacher.
Another memoir, Bad Times in Buenos Aires, is unusual for a story
about living in Buenos Aires because the writer cheerfully admits to not being
able to dance and not really understanding tango at all. It is, perhaps, a
useful antidote to the other books I’ve mentioned.
Tango in films
While tango hardly
features in European and American novels, you can scarcely move for tango in
the movies. I’ve already mentioned the films of Carlos Gardel and Rudolph
Valentino, but Argentina still produces great tango movies. My personal
favourite is Tango.
There are plenty of
tangos in mainstream US and European films, though. Probably the most
well-known is the stunning tango scene in Scent of a Woman.
There are films
where tango is central to the plot, like Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango and others where it is only incidental.
Often it is used for humour – a favourite of mine is in Addams Family Values (definitely not one for purists!).
I could carry on
listing tango movies for a very long time. (I once went to a club where one evening
we danced to nothing but film music for hours). It’s probably best not to push
my luck now. Do say if you want more.
Happy tango!
Reference
Horatio Ferrer’s classic history of tango is a multi-volume epic that foreign dignitaries may be presented with on State Visits. Ferrer is a poet rather than a historian and it’s not an easy read. The shorter English language version published by Manrique Zago ediciones is not an easy read either, but the illustrations are profuse and gorgeous. Well worth a look if you are interested in the history of tango.
A word from our sponsor
That’s enough tango for one week. I’ll be back again next week. I post something on this blog a little over once a week on average, but I don’t make a penny out of it. If you enjoy reading the blog, the only thing I ask is that you buy one or more of my books. If this post has interested you at all in Argentina (a wonderful country) then you might like to consider Burke in the Land of Silver, which is largely set in Buenos Aires during the years when people were beginning to rise against Spanish rule. Argentina finally achieved independence in 1816.
If you would like to know more about the tango scene in London or get advice on how to start learning to dance, do get in touch through the ‘Contact’ page.
When Stars Will Shine
is a collection of more than 20 short stories – some very short and some rather
more substantial. They are all on a theme of Christmas
and, because the book is being sold in aid of a military charity (Help for
Heroes ) many, though by no means all, of the writers have chosen to include
soldiers or ex-soldiers in the stories. Otherwise these stories have very
little in common. Some are funny – some of them very funny. (Lucy Cameron’s What Can Possibly Go Wrong? was a personal
favourite.) Some are horror stories. Several, given the Christmas theme, are
inevitably sentimental, often combined with a liberal attack on our uncaring
society that can become cloying. The message that we treat veterans shockingly
badly is one that needs to be heard, but light fiction may not always be the
right place.
Obviously I enjoyed some of these
stories much more than others, but that is inevitably the way with a collection
of short stories by different authors. It will probably be the case for most
readers, but what I enjoyed they may hate and what turned them off may have
been the ones I most liked. It’s like a tin of Quality Street. Some people like
the soft centres and some people like the nuts, but you have to rummage around
in the tin and pick out your personal favourites. All of the stories are
professional efforts by experienced writers. Given this, I’m not going to go
through recommending this or that story. A collection this size will have
something to offer almost everybody and, at just £2 on Kindle (https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Stars-Will-Shine-Helping-ebook/dp/B08234131P) it represents excellent value for money. And all the proceeds go
to Help for Heroes, which offers ex-servicemen the help they should be able to
expect from government but often don’t seem to get.
I see beggars on our local train clean
up every night by pretending to be ex-soldiers. (They aren’t.) People hand over
money because, whatever you think of the wars we have sent people to fight over
the past decades, the men and women who fought them went because our government
sent them and we owe them something. If everyone who gave money to beggars with
a hard-luck story bought this book instead (or just donated directly to Help
for Heroes) it would make a real difference.
